On the Edge Read online

  She worked away, doing what she could to reawaken his ardour, and there was plenty that she knew how to do, but it was hopeless. They both knew it was hopeless.

  In the end she gave up. Stopped. Abruptly. Pulled together her clothes. Began putting them on.

  ‘I am sorry, mon ange.’

  ‘You should see someone, you know. There are pills …’

  ‘It will pass.’

  ‘It’s been six months. It’s only because you’re so damn proud. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. So what if you’re not the great French lover?’

  ‘Hey, I used to make you scream with pleasure,’ Martel protested, stung.

  ‘It’s hard to make babies without having sex first,’ Cheryl said. ‘They might not teach us much in Wisconsin, but they do teach us that.’

  ‘Be patient.’

  ‘This isn’t just going to go away by itself,’ she said, wriggling into her jeans. ‘You’re going to have to do something to make it get better.’

  She pulled on her T-shirt and marched out of the living room towards her studio, banging the door behind her.

  Martel lay on the rug, naked, his crumpled underwear only a few inches away from his nose. That ball in his stomach twisted again.

  6

  Calder let out the clutch and allowed the Maserati to crawl a few yards further up Heath Street in Hampstead. It wasn’t far from his flat near Parliament Hill to his sister’s house in Highgate, but it would take him twenty minutes through the bottleneck of Sunday morning traffic around the Heath.

  The Maserati’s four-litre engine growled softly in frustration. It was an early-nineties model, the Ghibli Cup, noted more for its performance than for its looks. Calder didn’t care. He still craved the sensation of speed and power he had experienced in fast jets, and just occasionally, when he opened up the Maserati on an empty road, he came close to feeling it again. He loved the way it demanded skilful handling in corners, and the feeling that even if it was only crawling along at five miles an hour there was enough power under the bonnet to leave all the other cars on the road standing.

  But the electrics were hopeless. Fortunately, it was starting without trouble at the moment, but he dared not lower the windows for fear of never getting them up again. Another trip to the specialist garage in Hertfordshire was required.

  It had been a bad week. Not necessarily as far as the markets were concerned. Calder had kept well clear of the Italian situation, having decided he didn’t understand what was going on. But Linda Stubbes had begun her investigation.

  Her interview with Calder had given him some idea of Carr-Jones’s line of defence. Calder had told Linda what had happened in the bar, which he remembered clearly. But then Linda had asked him to repeat the actual words Carr-Jones had said to Jen.

  ‘“Are you shagging him, then?”’ Calder said.

  Linda wrote the words down on her pad and showed them to Calder. ‘Are you quite sure this is what you heard?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Calder.

  ‘Hm.’ Linda studied her pad. ‘Because, you see, it’s different from what Justin and Jen say was said.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘According to Jen, Justin said: “Are you screwing him, then?”’

  ‘Well, that’s about right,’ said Calder. ‘Screwing, shagging, it all means the same.’

  Linda frowned. ‘Possibly. But it shows the two of you have a slightly different recollection of what happened.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Linda. Anyway, what does Justin think he said?’

  She looked back at her notes. ‘“Are you two shagging?”’

  ‘So what difference does that make?’

  ‘He claims he said it to you. He says that he was pulling your leg. He says that if he meant to offend anyone, it was you, but that only in jest.’

  ‘That’s not right,’ Calder said. ‘He was definitely speaking directly to Jen. It was her he was accusing. And he was insulting her, not joking with her.’

  ‘I see.’ Linda was writing everything down carefully. But Calder could already see the way things were going. The investigation would boil down to his and Jen’s word against Carr-Jones’s that it was Jen that had been insulted and not Calder. He suspected Carr-Jones’s next step would be to discredit him as a witness. This was turning into just the kind of political contest that Calder loathed and Carr-Jones excelled in.

  Calder and Jen had scarcely spoken. As Linda had suggested, she had spent very little time at work while the investigation was under way. She still had to make herself available to talk to HR, but she wasn’t involved in any of the trading on the desk. She seemed aloof and angry. He had tried to talk to her several times, but she had rebuffed him. It was as though she wanted to keep everyone and everything at Bloomfield Weiss at arm’s length, including him. He was disappointed to be counted with the rest of the firm, but he could reluctantly understand it.

  Eventually the Maserati chugged through the stop–start traffic to his sister’s home. This was a large detached house in a road of large detached houses, and Anne and her husband William had lived there for only six months. It had been bought with the proceeds of some sizeable payouts William had received from the venture-capital firm of which he was a partner. Anne no longer worked: she had been a promising barrister but with the arrival of their second child she had given up the struggle.

  Calder parked on the street. There were three cars in the driveway: his sister’s suburban-warrior-woman Jeep, her husband’s Jag, and an old red Volvo. His heart sank.

  He rang the bell, clutching the bunch of irises he had brought with him. Anne opened it for him, and he entered the war zone, stepping over a couple of dolls, the plastic contents of a plastic supermarket and the lost spur of a wooden railway line.

  ‘Lovely flowers, Alex,’ said his sister, giving him a hug. ‘Come through to the kitchen.’ She looked as messy as her hallway, spiky black hair, denim skirt and a woollen many-coloured jersey.

  ‘Anne! You didn’t say he was going to be here!’

  ‘I wanted to make sure you came,’ she said, digging a vase out of a cupboard. The kitchen was still in good condition, and must have cost its previous owner tens of thousands of pounds. The Varcoe family had only just begun trashing it. Through the window he could see their fenced-in swimming pool at the far end of the garden, looking a hemisphere out of place in the grey February dampness.

  ‘That’s not fair. Of course I would have come.’

  ‘Oh yeah? You didn’t show up last time I asked him.’

  ‘That was different. I had to go to New York on short notice.’

  ‘Such an important man.’

  Calder sighed. ‘OK. You’ve got me.’ He straightened up. ‘Let’s go.’

  Brother followed sister into the living room. There was Anne’s husband William, balding and middle-aged in his middle thirties. He was talking to a tall upright man with a craggy face and a shock of thick white hair.

  ‘Hello, William,’ said Calder. ‘Father.’

  ‘Alex.’

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ said William. He and Calder’s father were drinking very pale sherry.

  ‘Yeah. Have you got a beer?’

  William scurried off. From the next room a child, Phoebe, began to whine and Anne rushed off to her, leaving father and son alone. Calder hadn’t seen his father in over a year. He was determined to prevent this meeting from ending like the last one.

  ‘Och, that wee lass has Annie twisted round her little finger,’ the older man said.

  ‘She is quite demanding,’ Calder admitted. Phoebe was a clever four-year-old who revelled in making her mother’s life as difficult as possible. She was as sweet as anything to Calder, but a monster to her parents. William did his best to avoid her, but Anne was run ragged.

  ‘They’ll end up spoiling her, you know.’

  ‘Things have changed since we were children, Father,’ Calder said, taking the opportunity to back up his sister.

  ‘That’s rot. I s
ee children in my surgery all the time. You can tell the ones that are well brought up. And it’s got nothing to do with money or social class, I can tell you. Quite the reverse.’

  Dr Calder’s r’s rolled with the resonance of the Borders, although Calder sometimes wondered whether his father’s brogue strengthened as he travelled south. His own Scottish accent had softened considerably with time and distance, as had Anne’s.

  She returned, balancing a sniffling Phoebe on her hip. ‘Come and show Grandpa,’ she cooed.

  Phoebe waved a dishevelled plastic pony at her grandfather. He took it, his grey eyes twinkled and he slipped Phoebe a secret smile, only for her. ‘And what’s this wee creature’s name?’ he asked her, his voice rumbling with gruff warmth.

  Phoebe stopped sniffling. ‘Popsy.’

  ‘Popsy? That’s a fine name,’ lied her grandfather with all the conviction of the smoothest bond salesman. ‘You run along now and give Popsy her oats.’

  ‘Him. Popsy’s a he. And he likes chicken nuggets.’

  ‘That’s grand, now,’ said Dr Calder. ‘And give him some extra ketchup from me.’

  As Phoebe toddled off happily towards the plastic food strewn all over the hallway, Anne shook her head. ‘I don’t know how you do that, Father. Do you, Alex?’

  ‘No,’ Calder replied, repressing an irrational upsurge of resentment. He knew it was ridiculous, but he felt jealous of the little girl. Dr Calder was famous throughout Kelso, the small Borders town where he worked, for his smile and his kind words, but Calder couldn’t remember the last time the doctor had smiled like that at his own son. Before his mother had died, probably. He felt a further surge of irritation that he let it bother him. He was thirty-four now. He had decided many years before that he could get by without his father’s approval.

  ‘It’s a shame Nicky couldn’t make it,’ Anne said.

  ‘Mm.’ Calder glanced at his sister. ‘She moved out last month.’

  Anne’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Oh, I am sorry about that, Alex. What happened?’

  ‘You mean, did I end it or did she? She did. Said I wasn’t taking enough notice of her. The trouble was, we were both working such long hours. She’d managed to shuffle her shifts around to get a couple of days off so we could go to Paris together, and then I had to cancel. She wasn’t impressed. The last straw, she said.’

  Anne touched Calder’s arm in sympathy. ‘I know how much you liked her.’

  Calder shrugged, pretending indifference. But he did like her. Loved her really, although he had foolishly never quite got round to telling her that. And Nicky was right that he had taken her for granted. Life had been pretty bleak since she had moved out of his flat. He had phoned her several times, but the conversations had been brief, and she had ignored his attempts to discuss rekindling the relationship. He had tried to invite himself round to the studio flat she had rented in Tufnell Park but she was having none of it.

  ‘Pity,’ said his father. ‘She was the girl you were with the last time I saw you, wasn’t she? Sensible woman. Thought she’d make an excellent doctor.’

  ‘I’m sure she will,’ said Calder. ‘She’s certainly dedicated enough.’

  Lunch passed pleasantly, with the exception of Phoebe’s reluctance to eat anything that was put in front of her, although her younger brother, Robbie, stuffed his face with enthusiasm. Calder liked Robbie. He seemed to view the hyperactive antics of his mother and sister with detached amusement. Calder hoped he would continue to find life so entertaining.

  When the plates and the children had been cleared away and the adults were drinking coffee, the conversation turned to William’s job. His firm, Orchestra Ventures, had just invested in a company that was growing human tissue from bone marrow that could somehow be used to replace heart pacemakers. Dr Calder was fascinated, and began asking William questions that he couldn’t quite answer. William being William, he didn’t admit to the fact that one of his colleagues was the medical expert and that he knew nothing, but instead made up his replies. Dr Calder caught him out, but did so politely.

  The doctor sipped his coffee and eyed his son. ‘It is good to see you money men doing something useful for a change, don’t you think, Alex?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Calder, neutrally.

  ‘Now what exactly did you do last week?’

  It was a simple question, a father taking interest in his son’s work. But Calder knew there was much more to it than that.

  ‘I traded bonds, Father.’

  ‘Traded bonds? What exactly does that mean?’

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t be interested.’

  ‘Ah. So you think it’s a wee bit too complicated for us simple souls in the real world?’

  ‘No. Not at all,’ Calder said. He sipped his coffee. His father looked at him. ‘All right. I bought some Italian government bonds. And then I sold them.’

  ‘And you made money doing it?’

  ‘Yes. Two million dollars. Or euros. It’s more or less the same thing.’

  ‘Two million!’ Dr Calder stared at his son. ‘So all you did was buy a few of these Italian bonds, do nothing and then sell them, and you made two million dollars. That’s more than most people make in their whole lives.’

  ‘I suppose that’s right. Although it was a few hundred million bonds I bought.’

  ‘I find that incredible. You made money out of money. Isn’t that just gambling?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Calder. He tried to keep calm. ‘It’s investing. Allocating capital to wherever in the world it’s most needed.’

  ‘Adam Smith’s invisible hand,’ said William in support.

  Dr Calder smiled at his son-in-law. ‘I can see that you investing in a company that is going to improve the survival rates of people with heart disease is allocating capital to where it’s most needed. But that’s not what you’re doing, is it, Alex?’

  ‘The Italian government needs investment just as badly,’ said Calder.

  ‘But didn’t you say that you sold the bonds last week? So they needed the investment two weeks ago, but they don’t need it now?’

  Calder thought of trying to argue about the role of price discovery in the financial markets, but he didn’t have the heart.

  ‘It’s greed, isn’t it?’ said Dr Calder. ‘Pure greed.’

  ‘We are trying to make money. That is what we get paid for.’

  ‘I really don’t understand it,’ said the doctor. ‘There are thousands of you youngsters living in London passing all these bonds and shares and what have you around to each other and paying yourselves hundreds of thousands of pounds just for playing in your private little game. And what does the game produce? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Or nothing that I can see, anyway. Whereas in the rest of the country, normal people do normal jobs, making things, helping each other, serving each other, and get paid a fair wage for it. I dread to think what your grandfather would have to say about it.’

  Calder stared at his father, biting back the arguments. Calder’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been ministers of the kirk, tough men with a hard line in religion.

  ‘And what are you using to play your little gambling games, eh? The savings of these ordinary people. But you don’t care. Win or lose, you still get paid.’

  ‘The City brings in huge amounts of revenue for this country,’ Calder said.

  ‘So does betting tax. And duty on alcohol and cigarettes. That doesn’t mean that booze and fags are a good thing for anybody.’

  ‘Father, we’ve been through this before.’ Calder was unable to keep the frustration from his voice. ‘I like my job and I’m good at it. Taking risks is what I do best. Isn’t that enough reason to do it?’

  Dr Calder shook his head. ‘I don’t know where your mother and I went wrong. There should be much more of a reason to be alive than gambling and greed, shouldn’t there?’

  Calder felt the old anger rising. At the age of sixteen, a year after his mother had died, he had decided not to study scienc
es at A level as his father had wanted. He had gone to an English university, not Edinburgh, where he had read history, not medicine. When he had become an RAF pilot, he had expected his father’s disapproval and received it, but it was nothing to the contempt his father had heaped on him when he had joined Bloomfield Weiss.

  Yet Calder had brought all this upon himself, driven by some deeply hidden but overpowering desire to do the opposite of what his father wanted. The doctor had a firm view of the world and the role that his son was to play in it. It was a view that Calder didn’t necessarily disagree with, a view he admired even, but for Calder that wasn’t what the struggle was about.

  ‘Of course there’s more to my life than gambling and greed,’ Calder said, his voice rising in spite of himself.

  ‘Really? What did … what was her name … Nicky think?’ Calder thought he could trace the faintest of smiles on the old man’s face, as though pleased he had once again managed to needle his son.

  It was that smile that did it. Something inside Calder snapped. ‘Besides,’ he said, making no attempt now to repress the anger. ‘It’s my life. I’ll do with it what I like. You’ve been trying to tell me what I should do for as long as I can remember. The thing is, I won’t let you. I haven’t in the past, and I won’t in the future.’

  ‘All I’m trying to do is to make sure that you don’t waste your talents.’

  ‘That’s not what you’re trying to do at all! You’ve got this fixed idea of the world, all very noble, I’m sure, and you want me to fit into it. Well, I won’t. I can do a job I enjoy and I’m good at, even if it isn’t up to your high moral standards. It’s not illegal. It doesn’t do anyone any harm.’

  Dr Calder shook his head. ‘It’s up to you what kind of life you lead. You do what you feel you have to do.’

  ‘I bloody well will, you interfering, sanctimonious …’Calder was shouting now, but he just managed to restrain himself before the words ‘old bastard’ flew from his mouth. There was silence around the dinner table as they all looked at him. Damn. He had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t rise to his father’s bait. He took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry, Anne. If you don’t mind, I must be going. I have some stuff to do at home.’